Art. 33. Peace the real Interest of every Human Being: an Address, delivered at Brighton, July 7. 1814, being the Day appointed for Thanksgiving on Account of the Re-establishment of Peace, &c. By John Evans, A.M. 8vo. Is. 6d. Sherwood and Co. : Mr. Evans, who loses no opportunity for printing a single sermon, has availed himself of the Thanksgiving-day, even though he was at a watering-place, and has taken, moreover, a Greek motto from Luke ii. 14., and a quotation from Dr.Watts's Songs for Children *. Of the latter, we shall say no more than that it is beneath the dignity of the pulpit but we must observe on the former, viz. the motto, (Eys EIPHNH,) that, though short, it is not quite appropriate; since peace is not yet restored either to our land or to the earth. It is mere justice, however, to observe on behalf of this preacher that he is throughout animated by the best feelings, and delivers sentiments worthy of the patriot, the philanthropist, and the Christian. His soul is harrowed up by recollections of the evils of war; he, therefore, hails in animating strains the blessings of peace, as favourable to human happiness and moral glory; and he anticipates the approach of "Reason to its manhood," when, under the benignant influence of Christianity, the pacific will take place of the military spirit. It is consoling to catch at such hopes: but alas! neither antient history nor modern experience justifies sanguine expectations of this kind. *A wicked wight, arguing in support of Hobbes's doctrine that the state of nature was a state of war, chose also to quote the passage from Watts's songs to children which Mr. Evans has inserted in his sermon: but, to mark his opinion of the poetry, and to turn it, bad as it was, to his own account, he eked out the couplet with an addendum of the same quality, thus: "Let dogs delight to bark and bite, For God has made them so ;" And God made man to snarl and fight CORRESPONDENCE. We owe our best thanks to B. P. and shall endeavour always to merit similar confidence. J. D. is received, and shall be considered: but he must be aware that he comes before us under suspicious circumstances as to the interest which he takes in the tract in question. R. X. is requested to allow us to adopt his negative alternative. The Appendix to Vol. lxxiv. of the M. R. was published with the last Number, and contained FOREIGN LITERATURE, with the General Title, Table of Contents, and Index for the Volume. THE MONTHLY REVIEW, For NOVEMBER, 1814. - ART. I. Ancient Drama. Old English Plays; being a Selection. from the early Dramatic Writers. Volumes I. and II. 8vo. Martin. 1814. THE HE preface to the second edition of Dodsley's Collection of old Plays (1780) concludes with these words: "To those who may be dissatisfied with the manner in which this work is conducted, the editor can only say, that the undertaking appeared to him much easier before he engaged in it, than he found afterwards in its progress through the press. He might safely rely on the candour of those who have experienced the trouble and difficulty attending such performances as the present; and to those who have not, could wish to address himself in the words of one who had, says the gentleman who quotes him, long laboured in the province of editorial drudgery; and who thus appeals to the judgment and benevolence of the reader: "If thou wert ever an editor of such books, thou wilt have some compassion on my failings, being sensible of the toil of such sort of creatures; and, if thou art not yet an editor, I beg truce of thee till thou art one before thou censurest my endeavours." On such principles, we might perhaps be accused of having, on a late occasion, dealt rather hardly with the editor of one of our early dramatic poets, whom we certainly imagined ourselves compelled to censure as wholly and in every respect unfit for the office which he had undertaken *: but the lapse of five-andthirty years, of research and industry unparalleled, has raised the qualifications while it has smoothed the labours of such an editor; and, without exacting so much critical taste or minuteness as to discourage from undertakings of this nature those who are really competent, it appears to us to be one of the duties of our office to remind those whom we find engaged in them, from time to time, of what is reasonably to be expected and required at their hands. It is almost superfluous to state to our readers that the collections of Dodsley and Hawkins are very far from having supplied the vacuum in our old English literature, which arises from the extreme scarcity of all the early printed editions of plays acted before the Restoration. Mr. Garrick's library, (now in the * See Weber's edit. of Ford, M. R. for March and April, 1812. VOL. LXXV. Q British British Museum,) which formed the basis of those collections, furnished each of them with only a few specimens of its stores; and those specimens were for the most part selected (we by no means say injudiciously) with a view to the greatest possible variety, and to include the names of the largest number of writers, rather than for their intrinsic excellence. Thus their contributions from Ford and Dekker, Webster and Middleton, Heywood and Shirley, amount to no more than two or at most three out of the numerous productions of each of those poets; while the rest of the collection is shared in almost equal proportions between Peele and Lyly, Wilkins and Brewer, Barry, Cooke, and Tomkis, and a crowd of others whose names for the most part deserve the oblivion which would certainly have been their portion but for the indiscriminate zeal of their revivors. Whatever may be alleged in defence of the compilers of these first selections, the same cannot be admitted as equally justifi catory of later collectors; and this is one of the reasons that have induced us to notice the publication now before us, when only two volumes out of the six that are proposed have yet made their appearance. Each of these volumes consists of four plays; and, at the same rate, four-and-twenty will be the number comprehended in the complete collection, the advertisement of which informs us that it is designed to extend to the period of the Restoration, and to contain a selection from the works of the most celebrated dramatic writers before that epoch. Of the plays now published, the first two ("Doctor Faustus," and "Lust's Dominion, or the Lascivious Queen,") are the productions of Marlowe; an author who, as Malone has observed, was "the most famous and admired poet of that age, previous to the appearance of Shakspeare." At the present time, it can only be remarked in his praise that he certainly contributed something towards improving the barbarous taste of his time, and rendering it more fit to relish and admire the purer models of the dramatic art which were soon to follow : but "King Cambyses's Vein" was still uppermost. "On Horror's head Horrors accumulate" seems to have been the only intelligible object of all his labours; and the charms of poetical diction and smooth versification, which he possessed in an eminent degree, serve rather to increase the disgust which the barbarous and stupid plots of his dramas are always sure to excite. Out of twenty-four plays, we should not have been tempted to give room to two from the pen of Marlowe. Of those here presented to us, "Faustus" is intitled to the preference both as reflecting more strongly the tastes and feelings of our ancestors, and as giving greater scope to the gloomy but often powerful colouring of the author's pencil. Notwithstand ing a few fine passages, and one or two well-imagined but raw and imperfect sketches of character, the "Lascivious Queen" might still have slept with her lovely Moor under her original quarto coverlid. Lyly, that insufferable Elizabethian coxcomb, who taught the gallants of his day to "parle Euphaism," is still less intitled to the honours of revival; and we cannot but deem it most uneconomical to have admitted, in so confined a selection, three of his tiresome and pedantic comedies. Of these, "Mother Bombie" is scarcely readable from its flat insipidity; and the only merit ever possessed by "Endymion" must have been that which our virgin queen never failed to find in the most fulsome flattery. "Midas" alone is in better taste, and, though tiresomely prosing, deserves some praise for the purity of its language and the ingenuity of its political allusions. Marston's dramatic genius is of a higher stamp than either of the former. His comic humour sometimes serves to remind us of Shakspeare: he abounds in sarcasm; and the satirical misanthrope, whose character appears in almost every one of his pieces, if it justly exposes him to the charge of sameness or mannerism, nevertheless affords almost constant amusement, and occasionally good moral reflection. He wrote with unpardonable haste and carelessness; and the plots of all his plays,. which generally bid very fair in the beginning, turn out to be miserably lame and undigested long before the conclusion. We find, however, more of the substance of dramatic composition in this writer than in either of the others; and, if one of Marlowe's and two of Lyly's productions had been struck out of this collection, we should not have grudged the space allotted to Marston's "Antonio and Mellida," "What you will," and "Parasitaster." "Shakspeare's real power," says Johnson in his admirable preface, "is not shewn by the splendour of particular passages, but by the progress of the fable and the tenor of the dialogue; and he that tries to recommend him by select quotations will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen." In forming our judgment of the comparative merits of Shakspeare and his contemporaries, the safest course, perhaps,. will be to reverse the rule altogether. Poetical imagery and versification were qualities by no means confined to the one, or but sparingly and inadequately possessed by the others; and a series of extracts of the poetical beauties of all our elder dramatists, consisting merely of abstract phrases and sentiments, would derive contributions, if not equally rich, at least within the limits of some visible proportion, from many of his satellites as well as from that immortal luminary himself. It is doing injustice to Shakspeare, by withdrawing him from the reach of fair appreciation, to represent him as "A column midst the melancholy waste." The poetical age of our great dramatist was not a desert, but a city full of ill-built yet splendid palaces; and the magnificent fabric which he reared is contemplated to the best effect when compared with the surrounding structures. Many of the materials of which that edifice is composed are the same (in shew at least, if not positively in substance,) that "these are made of" though in the fair proportion and useful combination of those materials, it stands not only unequalled but alone. With the exception of a very few plays of Jonson and Massinger, the contemporaries of Shakspeare appear to have had literally no idea of a regular and well connected dramatic fable: If the first two or three scenes or acts of the play give any promise whatever of a suitable conclusion, it is almost certain that such promise will be miserably disappointed; so that we may nearly venture to say that every dialogue was written. without the slightest notion of that which was to succeed it. The rapidity with which these works were formed, and the object which they had in view, viz. simply to please the palate of a rude and undisciplined audience, seem hardly sufficient to account for this strange and total defect of organization, after such an example had been set as Shakspeare left behind him. In the observation of character, and the "tenor of the dialogue," they frequently present to us more worthy objects of comparison; and, in these respects, the comedies of Jonson are almost equal to those of Shakspeare. The playful imagination of Fletcher makes some amends for his gross defects in almost every other dramatic requisite. That which Mr. Charles Lamb (in his "Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of Shakspeare") pleases to denominate "the noble practice of those times," i. e. " of two or more persons joining in the composition of the same play," could in fact be no other than the result of that indifference to any thing beyond present emolument and applause, which seems to characterize the "Wits" of this early period, and to afford the only reasonable explanation of the backward progress, or at best the stationary level, of the dramatic art, to the period of the Restoration. With the time succeeding that event we have now no concern; and the depravation of the stage in Charles's days, together with its little and casual subsequent improvements, depends on other causes, and affords a much wider and more interesting field for inquiry. Though, |